We’ve previously discussed Productivity Tricks That Will Make Using Google Sheets Easier. But how about Google Sheets features that can help you be more productive at other aspects of your work and life? Or how about some use cases that could save you a lot of time by just using Google Sheets instead of other tools?
Stay with us as we explore features within Google Sheets and how to use them to your advantage in reclaiming your hard-wrought productive time!
1. Use Template Gallery to Find Productivity Tools
In today’s digital age, there’s no shortage of productivity apps that can do all sorts of things. But consider this — what if you could do the same things within Google Sheets? Fewer tools make less clutter!
Google Sheets has a built-in Template gallery that allows you to choose from a variety of useful productivity-oriented configurations within your spreadsheets.
Example 1. You can create your To Do List using one of the Personal templates.
Example 2. Make a Monthly Budget using Google’s basic template.
And the best part is all of these are customizable to your needs.
There’s a lot of templates to explore built right into Google Sheets. But don’t be afraid to look elsewhere for even more powerful templates made by others. Google Search is your best friend!
2. Make Use of Google Sheets and Google Forms Integrations
Google Forms is one of Google’s signature tools that has taken over the most part of the decade. The crux of Google Forms’s usefulness is being able to integrate it directly to Google Sheets! That way, all the new responses you collect become added to your spreadsheet, available for you to analyze or look up.
Let’s say you run a small bookkeeping and consulting firm and would like to collect inquiries using Google Forms into Google Sheets.
Step 1. Create your form within Google Forms on the Question tab.
Step 2. Go to the Responses tab and click on the green Google Sheets icon. Here you can create a new Google Sheets spreadsheet directly or select an existing one to collect your responses automatically.
Now all your new responses are also collected in a spreadsheet for you to act on later.
This is much better than reading off responses directly on Google Forms. This also allows you to use Google Sheets features like sorting, filtering, and exporting as PDF!
3. Publish Your Spreadsheets as Web Pages
Did you know that you can publish spreadsheets to the web natively? No need for a separate website to host your file — you can do it directly on the Sheets interface. It’s a more lightweight way to share content than sharing Sheets files or having your audience download PDFs to their devices. You can even directly publish links to your sheets to Gmail, Facebook, or Twitter.
Here are a few use cases:
- Sharing business information like price lists, product brochures, or inventory info.
- Sharing your analytics charts and graphs.
- Creating contact directories of different departments, agencies, or offices.
- Sharing information about the services you offer in table format.
Step 1. To do this, open your spreadsheet and go to File > Share > Publish to Web.
Step 2. Customize which tabs you’d like to share. By default, you are sharing your Entire Document but you can select just the parts you like. You can even set it to Automatically republish when changes are made to your spreadsheet so it’s just like managing a webpage.
4. Embed Your Google Sheets to your Website or Other Platforms
Instead of creating new tables on your website or other productivity and project management platforms, consider embedding a Google Sheets spreadsheet instead. This allows your information to always be in sync and uniform.
Embedding can be done on your website and also works on many platforms that accept HTML embeds like Notion and ClickUp. Look at this quick guide to embed Google Sheets in WordPress.
You can get your embed code by going to File > Share > Publish to Web. Go to the Embed tab beside Link and click on Publish. This will give you the HTML code you can copy and paste to a compatible platform. You can customize which tabs you’d like to show or even the entire spreadsheet.
5. Attach and Organize Files Directly on Google Sheets
Having a collection of files can be a daunting chore to organize. Whether you’re handling project files, receipts, various PDFs of contracts, invoices, and quotations, you can make your life easier by bringing them into your spreadsheets directly using our tool called FileDrop.
A core feature of Google Sheets allows users to install extensions such as add-ons. To be able to do even more things within your spreadsheets, you’d want to install Filedrop for free by going to this link.
There’s a lot of things FileDrop can do including the following:
- Drag and Drop files from your computer to your spreadsheet.
- A File Library space to manage the files you’ve added and use them again.
- Add files already inside your Google Drive.
- PDF to text directly from Docs and Sheets using OCR technology
- Image to text without leaving the app.
- Premium upgrade to do even more with these features.
- + lots of more time-saving features with regular updates!
Using it is simple! Learn more about our add-on by visiting FileDrop and find out how you can save a lot of time by streamlining your processes using our free tool.
Conclusion on Google Sheets Features to Increase Productivity
That concludes our article about Google Sheets Features to Increase Productivity.
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